SOUL MATES UNLIMITED® Jewish Matchmaking Services

Judith Gottesman, Matchmaker and Dating Coach for Singles in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Portland, and Beyond

Love Experts

Matchmaking has been reclaimed as a contemporary calling by a new
generation of Jewish women.

By Susan Josephs
Wedding photos by Zev Fisher
Spring 2011

In her two years in business as a professional matchmaker, Judith
Gottesman has fielded plenty of phone calls from skeptics. “Their
parents or grandparents have paid for my services as a gift and what I
find out from them is that they think I’m either the old lady from Fiddler
on
the
Roof or the Millionaire
Matchmaker,” she says.

A 41-year-old former social worker based in Berkeley, Calif.,
Gottesman offers a distinct alternative to either the grandmotherly
Yente or the now-famous Patti Stanger, whose in-your-face, tough-love
approach to matchmaking has attracted more than a million viewers to
her reality TV show The Millionaire Matchmaker.

Calling her business Soul
Mates
Unlimited, Gottesman offers a lifetime of matchmaking
services for a one-time fee of $1,540 without guaranteeing a particular
number of dates and only collects additional cash upon a couple’s
engagement.

“I don’t turn people away because they’re too this or too that. I
try to help everyone, from the low-income to the wealthy,” she says.

Contemporary
Matchmaking

Arguably one of the oldest professions in the world, matchmaking,
as practiced by Gottesman and a growing number of other Jewish
professionals, has been reclaimed as a contemporary calling and
advertised as a pragmatic necessity in today’s fast-paced,
technology-driven world. And while they might evoke the iconic Yente by
claiming that matchmaking dwells in their DNA, today’s matchmakers also
sport an eclectic list of qualifications that would have mystified
Tevye and his fellow shtetl dwellers. They often have social work or
psychology degrees, hold strong opinions about modern etiquette and
optimal personal grooming practices and have their pulse on the
caprices of Internet dating and other pitfalls of 21st-century love.
Fueled by the success of TV shows such as Bravo’s The Millionaire
Matchmaker and NBC’s The Match Off, they cast themselves
as savvy experts that people hire to repair their love lives, just as
they might employ a personal trainer or interior designer to spruce up
their bodies and homes.

“People have an expert for everything in their lives today to help
them achieve their goals,” says Marc Goldmann, CEO of SawYouAtSinai
and JRetroMatch, which combines
Internet technology with flesh-and-blood matchmakers to help singles
find their mates. “It’s no different with matchmaking.”

Susan Shapiro, an author and writing professor who wrote about her
zest for amateur matchmaking in her book Secrets of a Fix-Up
Fanatic: How to Meet & Marry Your Match, likens the best
matchmakers to gurus or mentors who help people get to where they want
to go in life. “In order to change, you often need someone in your
corner to help you. It’s tough out there, and there’s no shame in
hiring a matchmaker,” she says.

Rachel Greenwald, for example, a 46-year-old matchmaker who recently
appeared on The Match Off, has made a career out of applying
her Harvard MBA to the business of finding love. “I combine my
in-stincts for matching people who are compatible with each other with
my knowledge of business and marketing,” says the bestselling author of
Find a Husband After 35: Using What I Learned at Harvard Business
School. “There’s a real practical side to finding love, and people
need research and strategy to understand what’s blocking them.”

In an era where some 20 million people continue to use online
dating sites, according to a recent New York Times article,
contemporary matchmakers often tout their personalized approach to love
as a viable alternative. Their target audience: the lovelorn who have
burnt out on scrolling through thousands of profiles, only to endure
bad dates where the person sitting across from them is, in actuality,
arrogant and conceited, not to mention short, bald and living with his
mother.

“The Internet has been great for my business,” says the
30-something Shoshanna Rikon, who’s been fixing up Jewish singles for
almost 13 years through her New York City-based Shoshanna’s Matchmaking
Service. “People have spent so much money on online dating, where
there’s major ADHD…all these people just look at profiles and are
clicking next, next. When people come to me, they get a guarantee of
compatible matches.”

For cities with small Jewish populations, online dating definitely
has its limitations, according to Laurie Berzack, a 42-year-old
matchmaker from Charlotte, N.C., who founded her company, Chai
Expectations, to serve the Jewish community. “JDate
opened up Jewish dating globally, but in small cities, everyone knows
everyone on JDate,” she observes. “People come to me because they have
tapped out their social networks.”

How Matchmaking Works

Berzack, Rikon and other matchmakers will conduct lengthy,
preferably face-to-face interviews with potential clients before
signing them up. But gone are the days when a matchmaker had to rely on
handwritten notes or a photographic memory to keep track of all the
single people in her shtetl. Goldmann, for example, has created a
company where more than 350 matchmakers sift through a combined
database of 45,000 profiles to make matches for clients all over the
world. “One of the problems with online dating is that it’s very hard
to assess a person purely by looking at his or her online profile,”
says the 41-year-old former management consultant. “What we offer are
intermediaries and oversight of this process.”

Both SawYouAtSinai and JRetroMatch, which, respectively, cater to
Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewish singles, require clients to submit
their own profiles and continually update their information.
Matchmakers then send clients profiles of potential matches; the
database’s filtering tools prevent the same match from being suggested
twice. Clients pay a monthly fee to stay active in the database and
only pay matchmakers in the event of an engagement.

Goldmann credits the birth of his company to Tova Weinberg, his
top matchmaker, who provided him with 3,000 contacts to launch the
database. Weinberg, 56, a former dentist who has lost track of how many
matches she’s made—somewhere over 200, she thinks—currently spends at
least 10 hours a day at matchmaking. Galvanized by a mission to prevent
intermarriage, she works with Jewish singles of all denominations and
has learned that far too many people “are looking for what they can’t
have. Everyone wants the brilliant female doctor who happens to be a
model at night,” she says. “My advice to people is if you like the
personality, then learn to love the looks.”

Weinberg, who donates the proceeds of her successful matches to
charity, differs from most of her peers in that she performs her job
only as a mitzvah and not for a living. Successful matchmakers,
however, can earn lucrative incomes, while the most famous among them,
Patti Stanger, charges $5,000 for a single two-hour lunch consultation.

“Yes, you can make a lot of money as a matchmaker,” says Stanger
in a phone interview. “But it’s an honorable profession. More important
than the money, you get credits in heaven.”

Lisa Clampitt, the co-founder of Matchmaking Pro, an institute
dedicated to training matchmakers and setting industry ethics and
standards, estimates that the majority of matchmakers charge anywhere
from $5,000 to $20,000 for a comprehensive list of services. A former
social worker who also runs VIPLife, an upscale, New York City-based
matchmaking company with a separate Jewish division, Clampitt believes
a good matchmaker should “set realistic expectations with clients. It’s
about staying true to your word about what you can and can’t provide,”
she says.

Matchmaking Success

On the subject of revealing their success rates, matchmakers seem
divided. SawYouAtSinai’s website, for example, prominently states it
has more than 1,000 engaged members. Greenwald says she’s re-sponsible
for more than 762 matches, but admits she also counts the matches from
people who wrote to her that they found someone after reading her
books, which include last year’s Have Him at Hello: Confessions
From 1,000 Guys About What Makes Them Fall in Love…Or Never Call Back.

Then there’s Gottesman, who will not divulge how many clients she
has, believing that “matchmaking is not about numbers, but people.” And
Berzack, who’s made “a handful of marriages” since she started
matchmaking in 2006, says she’s always a little suspicious when she
hears about matchmakers with enormous success rates. “I honestly don’t
know how many matches I’m responsible for…plus people have found each
other on their own after getting some coaching from me,” she says.

Evan Marc Katz, a Los Angeles-based dating coach who specializes
in personal consultations for women and empowering his clients to find
love on their own, believes “that matchmakers have the toughest job
around. I won’t even set up my friends with each other,” he says.

Though he respects what matchmakers do, Katz also feels many of
them ultimately can’t succeed be-cause “people are paying them to hand
over that right person. Nothing against matchmakers, but I want people
to take responsibility for why they’re still single. The first place to
look is in the mirror if you’ve been on JDate for 10 years and not
found anyone,” he says.

Clampitt would argue that a good matchmaker provides intensive
counseling to clients. “You need to be straightforward with people
about what is and isn’t working in their love lives. I also think the
really good matchmakers are truly obsessed with helping people find
love,” she says.

Gottesman, for example, always “hated seeing lonely people” and
discovered that matchmaking came naturally to her. She would set up
friends with acquaintances she met at parties and “was able to pick up
key bits of information about someone that would make me think, ‘wow,
this person would be perfect for so-and-so,’” she says.

A self-described “incurable romantic,” Berzack traces her calling
to her childhood, where “as a little girl, I believed the love of my
life was just outside my bedroom window, floating in the air, waiting
for me. I know that sounds hokey, but it shows my faith in love,” she
says.

In addition to her clients, who pay her anywhere from $5,000 to
$10,000, Berzack maintains a database of about 5,000 single people free
of charge. Selective about taking on new clients, Berzack asks
potential candidates a slew of questions about their past relationships
and what they seek in a mate. “If they tell me they’re looking for a
model or a size zero, I’m not taking them on,” she says. “I feel like
your head has to be in the right space to hire a matchmaker. You have
to be willing to get in touch with who you really are and be open to
critique.”

In addition to having good listening skills and an intuitive
understanding of people, Berzack also be-lieves that “being in a
successful relationship for the past 16 years” has helped her
comprehend other people’s relationship problems—a sentiment echoed by
other married matchmakers.

“All my relationship gurus were happily married,” says the now
happily married Shapiro. “If I were getting fixed up, I’d want someone
who’s already been through all of that.”

Married Matchmakers?

Does a matchmaker need to make her own match in order to do her
job right? This question comes up all the time for Stanger, who is
single. “People always want to know why I’m not married, and I tell
them to look at all the coaches who’ve never played in the NFL and got
their teams into the Super Bowl,” she says.

Rikon, another single matchmaker, believes her status allows her
to better relate to her clients. “I have real empathy for them because
I’m also out there dating, and I think that makes me a better
matchmaker,” she says.

As a student at the New York Institute of Technology, Rikon
discovered her knack for matchmaking when she kept successfully setting
up her sorority sisters. The people who seek out her services today,
she says, “are serious but not desperate. You have to be vulnerable to
sign up for a matchmaker and people come to me saying, ‘I can’t believe
I have to do this,’ and I have to keep telling them, ‘You’re not the
only one. New York City is a really hard place to meet, and people are
really picky.’”

But thanks to the recent visibility of the profession on
television, the stigma of hiring a matchmaker has definitely decreased,
says Beth Mandell, who runs the Jewish division of Clampitt’s company,
VIPLife. “It used to be I’d tell people I was a matchmaker and they
would just say, ‘Wow.’ Now, people are asking me for my card.”

Also, the numbers of people setting up shop as matchmakers seem to
be on the rise. Clampitt estimates that 50 to 75 matchmakers sign up
for the annual professional development conferences sponsored by
Matchmaking Pro. “People are so excited that this is a possible career
for them,” she says. “And I feel like we’ve developed a sense of
community over the years, where if I have a client, I might contact
someone else who might have a client who’s good for my client.”

It’s such a burgeoning profession,” observes Greenwald, who
conducts matchmaking boot camps for aspiring matchmakers, including at
Matchmaking Pro conferences. “The field of matchmaking is where online
dating was about eight years ago. And look at how common online dating
is today.”

Gottesman believes she has found her ideal job. “In all my years
of experience in the nonprofit world, it seemed to me that whatever
challenges people faced…money, health problems, whatever it was,
finding love seemed to help more than anything,” she says. “Helping
people find love is the best kind of social work I can do.”